


The Low Road (for the fast track)

by slexenskee (Sambomaster)



Series: All Time Low [1]
Category: Basketball RPF, Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 08:10:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2341256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sambomaster/pseuds/slexenskee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time there was an unfortunate soul named Kagami Taiga who: got a scholarship to play at the best football school in the country, ended up rooming with the five most obnoxious (and best) players on the basketball team, may or may not be gay, and realizes his life is actually kind of one big cosmic joke. </p>
<p>OR – the actual backstory of Kagami’s time in America.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Low Road (for the fast track)

**Author's Note:**

> The entire reason why this story even exists is because of one line (okay, maybe two) in furiosity’s ‘Aomine’s hypothetical diary’ where Aomine contemplates what Taiga might have been like as a boy. And then my brain went like: THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS TO ANSWER THAT, and then this somehow ended up happening. 
> 
> And yes, really, all of Taiga’s roommates are, in fact NBA players as high schoolers. For some reason I haven’t come across any NBA / Kuroko no Basuke crossovers so for everyone who doesn’t know NBA here’s the brief rundown - 
> 
> Steph Curry: point guard / shooting guard (Golden State Warriors)  
> Russell Westbrook: point guard (OKC Thunder)  
> Blake Griffin: power forward (Clippers)  
> Chandler Parsons: small forward (Rockets)  
> DeMarcus Cousins: center (Kings)

 

Taiga misses the housing deadline.

 

He doesn’t mean to (obviously, who the fuck would intentionally miss what could possibly be the most important day of their life) but he overslept after a binge night of team deathmatch, and he wakes up with hurt thumbs and swimming dreams of exploding tanks and no-scopes, and when he rolls over to doze back off he notices there’s an alarm going off on his phone.

 

He picks it up.

 

The alarm has been going off for two hours.

 

And Taiga is two hours late for dorm registration at the boarding school across the country in a city he’s never actually been to. He curses, and ducks down to find his laptop hiding under the bed. His dad is going to kill him—and that’s to say nothing of his mom. She’s gonna flip the table over and set the fucking house on fire. Neither of them were particularly enthused when Taiga got his offer letter to play football at RCP. Taiga was somewhat offended by this; Ryder College Prep has the best football program in the goddamn country, couldn’t they be proud of Taiga’s efforts? That said, they were probably more disapproving of the fact he wasn’t getting in for his grades.

 

Either way, their one stipulation was that Taiga absolutely one-hundred percent had to live in the dorms, because the idea of sending their baby boy all the way to Boston all alone was apparently a fate not even worth contemplating otherwise. Taiga had readily agreed; he was actually excited for the dorms. He hoped they were co-ed. He’d had American Pie themed fantasies for weeks after he’d sent his acceptance letter back.

 

He had been bouncing off the fucking walls when he’d told Tatsuya last week—

 

Taiga quickly shut that thought down. No use thinking on Himuro.

 

Not when there were more pressing matters to distract himself with, anyway.

 

“Fuck,” he says, staring blankly at the screen.

 

He’s well and truly missed registration; there isn’t a single dorm room still open. An optimistic little bubble at the bottom of the screen helpfully suggests a few places nearby that are open for rent. And that’s assuming someone’s going to sublet for a kid without a parent signature.

 

As a last ditch attempt, he viciously hits the reload button about a thousand times, in hopes that maybe someone will back out or something. This is clearly a delusion. Who the fuck would back out of housing?

 

He sits there for some time, something like dread pooling in his stomach when he thinks on how the hell he’s going to tell his parents this. Then there’s the anger that such an infinitesimally small setback like this could possibly destroy his football career before it even started. Then there’s the complete and utter horror at the idea of having to see Tatsuya in high school. And then guilt for dreading the thought of Tatsuya in the first place—

 

Fuck. Fuck. He’s so screwed, he’s—

 

… He’s going to room with the upper classmen.

 

Taiga sucks in a breath, clicking on the link the moment he sees it. It’s the registration page for the upper classmen dorms—and there’s precisely one opening left. Before he can think better of it, he’s already following the link and typing his name and student ID. Hell, if he’s not allowed to room in the building, he wouldn’t have been able to register for the room in the first place, right?

 

“Taiga?”

 

It’s his mom, muffled through the door.

 

“Yeah?” He returns, distracted.

 

“We’re going out for lunch,” She reminds, something like exasperation in her voice, “please tell me you’ve at least put on clothes.”

 

“What? Yes, clothes are on, I swear.” They’re absolutely not on. But she doesn’t need to know that.

 

“ _Taiga,_ ” She says again, and that’s _definitely_ exasperation. “Hurry up.”

 

“Coming!” He snaps the laptop shut once he reaches the confirmation page. “Five seconds, I swear.”

 

*

 

He doesn’t actually remember that any of that happened by the time they get to lunch. His parents are insufferable (as usual) and exasperated (as usual) with his complete and utter lack of table manners. They are, however, marginally—and perhaps even earnestly—excited for him.

 

Still, he doesn’t remember the incident at all until he’s standing in front of a building completely lacking any of the garish welcome decorations the freshmen dorms do.

 

For a moment he considers that perhaps he has the wrong address—there’s a Hall just across the street overflowing with zealous parents and nervous freshmen, all glibly causing chaos underneath a bright and overly optimistic sign with ‘WELCOME’ painted with a lopsided E. There are even balloons. Maybe he mistook something, and that’s actually where he’s supposed to go.

 

In contrast, Taiga’s dorm looks like a sad and unfortunate cousin, set meekly upon a cast row of larger, sterner buildings, slick with big and clean windows and lobbies with big glass doors that look like they were just dropped via helicopter an hour or so just for the occasion. Come to think of it, all the people inside sort of look like that too, all bright and happy like robots specifically imported for the event.

 

Taiga stands in front of the building so long that it was only inevitable that someone knocked into him.

 

“My bad,” The kid says, jovial, even as he helps Taiga pick up a knocked over bag. “Didn’t see you there!”

 

_Yeah_ , Taiga commiserates silently, he can see how that happened.

 

The kid—if Taiga can even call him that—is tall, tan, and lanky in a way that means he just recently grew six inches and doesn’t know what to do with it, not that he doesn’t work out. Taiga (who is no chump in the height department) probably looks like an insignificant bug from his vantage point. He is also the only one Taiga has seen go into the building for entire duration he’s spent silently gaping on the front step.

 

The other boy props a rolled up bed cover into his other arm, and sticks out his hand. “I’m Stephen, by the way,” He says, smiling brightly as Taiga shakes his hand. “Stephen Curry, but you can just call me Steph.”

 

“Cool,” His cheery disposition is so contagious that Taiga finds himself smiling back, even though he’s not all that excited about any part of this day. “Taiga Kagami, and same.”

 

“Are you in this building?” He gestures to the derelict little thing.

 

Taiga nods. “Yeah, uh… room 204 I think.”

 

“No way!” He gushes. “Me too! What bedroom number?”

 

“Three,” He says, although he actually has no idea. He’s fairly sure it was an odd number, though.

 

“Oh,” Steph’s face falls, but it is so brief and so quickly replaced with a smile that Taiga thinks he imagined it. “I’m two. Still, that’s great. You must be our sixth man.”

 

Taiga blinks. “I’m sorry?”

 

“I’m rooming with some teammates of mine,” He explains, lifting up a couple of his bags onto the landing of the building. “Anthony—our sixth—backed out because he’s scared we’re gonna surprise gangbang him in the middle of the night.”

 

Taiga can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

 

Steph’s face splits into a grin. “Nah, I’m fucking with you. He moved because he wanted to be in the same building as his girlfriend.”

 

“Oh,” Taiga cracks a smile at that.

 

He’s been in America for years now—he’s played almost every sport possible and has lived and breathed athlete culture for so long but sometimes he still doesn’t get the humor. Must be the Japanese in him. But, if there’s definitely one sport above all others that has him constantly confused it’s—

 

“So, what team are you guys on?”

 

“Basketball.”

 

Basketball. Which immediately makes him think of Himoru. Ugh, dammit, he’s gonna have to stop thinking about him at some point. Maybe this is a good thing, rooming with all these basketball kids. Maybe he’ll start to associate the sport with them and not Tatsuya.

 

“Cool,” He hopes his internal struggles aren’t playing out on his face. “I’m uh, starting on the Football team this year.”

 

“No shit, huh,” Steph returns, distracted somewhat by attempting to prop the door open with one of his suitcases. Taiga moves to help him.

 

The ensuing struggle for superiority over the dilapidated building would have been funny if he hadn’t been an active participant in it. When they finally get all their shit up the front steps and into the lobby, it quickly becomes apparent that this building is so old that installing an elevator wasn’t worth it to the school.

 

He’s breathing heavily by the time he picks up their conversation again. “Wait,” He balks. “Starting? What year are you?”

 

Taiga hesitates. “Uh…” Should he lie? But how the fuck is he going to keep that up the whole school year?

 

“Freshmen,” He says at length, internally terrified at whatever reaction Steph might have.

 

“Really?” Steph eyes him critically. “Well, no fucking wonder you’re on the football team; I thought you were a senior.”

 

Taiga looks away, abashed. He’s been told time and again that he’s bigger than everyone else, taller and stronger; it’s weird though, coming from someone like Steph. It means more somehow.

 

“This is great though!” Steph enthuses. “I was worried we’d get stuck with a little dipshit or something.”

 

He grins, and Taiga can’t tell if he’s intentionally scaring him with it or he’s just really that excited. “Just wait ‘til you meet the guys, they’re gonna fucking _love_ you.”

 

*

 

This is the understatement of the year.

 

By the time Steph and Taiga make their peace with the fact that no, there is not an elevator and yes, that means they have to move all their shit up a flight of stairs themselves, Steph’s teammates are already raising hell downstairs about the same predicament.

 

Taiga’s not entirely sure why they all take such a sudden liking to him, but he’s not above taking what he can get and not questioning a gift horse in the mouth. 

 

The words ‘young blood’ and ‘fresh meat’ are tossed around more times than he’s comfortable with, but quite frankly he expected the hazing. He was a fucking freshmen surrounded by seniors. Tall he may be for his age, but that was a hell of an age gap. Somehow, he ended up fitting in with them in more than just height range; where he had assumed there would be involuntary underwear streaking across the quad, there’s 2K all-nighters and dinner invitations; and more bud light than he knows what to do with.

 

They even invite him to what he’s quickly realizing is their real home: the basketball courts.

 

The school courts are a work of art, because if there’s one thing Ryder prizes above all else it’s athletics. And you can tell by the condition of their multiple and ostentatious rec centers dotted around campus. Taiga had expected them to drag him over to those, but instead they’re making camp at a rundown playground a block behind their building, looking for all the world like they were born and raised in the confines of this worn blacktop.

 

He plays a few rounds with them, but it’s pretty apparent they’re on a whole level above not just him, but the rest of humanity at large.

 

Taiga’s not all that surprised; he knew before coming here that Ryder’s percentages of graduates that go pro are off the charts. In all sports, but with a special footnote for basketball alone. He would be even less surprised to see all these guys playing in the NBA next year.

 

He watches Steph post up a few steps inside of the half court line, and release the most beautiful three-pointer Taiga’s ever seen in his life. It’s so beautiful it almost makes him want to cry. Instead he just makes a wounded noise in the back of throat, as if it was just so pretty it physically hurt to look at it. None of the guys bat an eyelash, although there’s some grumbling from Westbrook.

 

He’s parked himself at the far side of the chain-link fence, ostensibly reading his freshmen English requirements but really just staring blatantly at his roommates as they dick around on the courts.

 

_This is dicking around to them_ , Taiga notes, with no small amount of stilted disbelief. To anyone else this level of play would be a fucking deathmatch of a championship game, but here’s Parson’s snickering as he holds Westbrook by the forehead with one hand, dribbling with the other as Russell shouts obscenities at him as he tries to swipe for the ball.

 

Chandler moves for a fast break in what can only be considered a mouth-watering maneuver. He leaps for the dunk but Griffin flings himself out of nowhere with a war cry loud enough to summon Thor out of the sky and slams it out of his hands. Chandler cries in outrage and Steph shouts something about a ‘foul’, but Blake ignores them to rush the ball up the court, Westbrook not far on his tail. Russell then proceeds to jump for the shot, somehow spinning in midair as he flips the ball between his legs before he dunks it in.

 

“Taiga!” He roars, pounding his chest. “What the fuck are you doin’ over there?”

 

“Homework,” Taiga responds, blandly.

 

“Fuck the homework!” He crows. “I wanna see your jump shot!”

 

Taiga doesn’t _have_ a jump shot, but he’s game to pretend he does anyway.

 

*

 

Chandler Parsons is his actual roommate; a fact which he is thankful for every day thereafter in the school year. The other four are suitemates, which means that instead of fucking up his bedroom they just fuck up the kitchen, bathroom and common area.

 

Parsons is taller than him (as they all are, which, like, how the fuck is that possible) and his feet stick out the edge of his bed when he sleeps and they kind of smell sometimes but he is by far, bar none, the best roommate to have out of all of them. He’s tidy (for the most part) doesn’t snore, (for the most part) and is pretty damn strict on the lights out by ten rule. He is also vicious and sometimes murderously protective of their room when the rest of the team/upper classmen/school at large barges into their suite to fuck around and make a mess of things. And because he’s not a freshmen, people actually listen to him when he tells them not to do shit.

 

Unlike Taiga, who only receives an affectionate (but mostly patronizing) hair rub when he tries to tell everyone to clean up because the place looks like a fucking trap house.

 

In general they don’t actually treat him like a freshmen, but they do opportunistically find every moment to call him their ‘baby’ or any derivative therein.

 

Directly across from them is the dynamic duo of Russell Westbrook and Blake Griffin. They all refer to them both intermittently and singularly as Oscar the Grouch— not because they’re grouchy but because they live in a trashcan.

 

At the end of the hall in the biggest room of all three are Steph and DeMarcus Cousins. Cousins moved in a couple days after them and all Taiga knows about him currently is that he, ‘cooks better with the lights off’. He seems amiable enough; quiet where everyone else is loud and lousy, but still about as much of an asshole as the rest of them are. Their room also resembles a trash compactor, aside from the saving grace of the enormous erected shoe stand that takes up half the room. The amount of Air Yeezy’s, Jordans and KD’s existing in that small space more than make up for the fact that you can’t see the floor between all the trash.

 

Taiga was not sure what he’d expected in those brief moments after he’d signed up for this dorm and before he promptly forgot about it, but it definitely wasn’t this.

 

He wasn’t expecting to like them so much, and he definitely wasn’t expecting them to like _him._

Good at sports he may have been, but Taiga had never been one of the cool kids throughout his life in the public education system. He was either too foreign, too quite, or too obnoxious for the jocks and the cheerleaders at his middle school.

 

Ryder Prep is K-12, and what he’s seen of the middle school looks about the exact same as the one he’d just come from, but with a lot more money thrown at it. That he’s somehow ended up into the most popular crowd of seniors (and thereby in the school) is kind of beyond him.

 

Let it not be said that the Ryder basketball team was anything but reigning kings of the school—but if there was one sport that got more attention in RPC than basketball… it was good old American football.

 

Chandler is the kind of guy who finds love letters stuffed into his socks; Westbrook spends most of his time crowd surfing, or getting people to congregate into a group big enough for him to crowd surf on; Griffin appears to be the only person in this school with any legitimate sense of humor; Cousins is the guy that every scout in the history of athletic scouting secretly jerks off to and Steph is practically everyone’s favorite person.

 

And that leaves Taiga...

 

*

 

Taiga: the sudden and arbitrary darling of the school… after he caught the game winner yesterday against long time rival Archbishop Curley.

 

There is nothing in the school that is prioritized more than sports, and in the small galactic center of that universe is football. Until football ends of course, and is quickly replaced by basketball. Regardless, football is the bees knees, and Taiga, the only freshmen on first-string, is thereby _also_ the bees knees.

 

He’s not entirely sure how he even caught Tommo’s pass, because he’d stayed up all night too excited/nervous/violently ill to get any sleep and as a result he was wired, angry and silently freaking out for the whole game. In the second quarter or so he’d loosened enough; after a duration of time had passed and he’d caught a few solid passes to console himself with.

 

But the game got close at the end of the third; so close that Coach Kline had started hyperventilating halfway through his timeout speech about how they can’t lose the first fucking game of the fucking season (fuck, fuck, and then some more fucks were thrown intermittently into the rest of it). It wasn’t much of a pep talk, and when they called for a bang eight Taiga was practically on his way to hyperventilating himself. He could _not_ fuck this up. They’d be ahead if they could get a touchdown and a field goal, but if they fucked up now they’d probably never get the opportunity again.

 

Taiga is good at post plays: he’s good at all pass plays, actually, because he’s a wide receiver but also because he’s been told time and again that he jumps stupidly high and runs faster than the roadrunner when the coyote’s chasing after him. He reminds himself of this as they ready for the play, when he’s staring into the wild-eyed look of the defender in front of him and contemplating how bad it would be if he shits his pants right now.

 

And when he books it down the field and turns inwards for the pass, and when he jumps up with both defenders on his tail, and when he catches the football by only the grace of god himself and is promptly tackled straight over the endzone he still hasn’t quite been able to remind himself that he’s actually kind of good at football.

 

It’s not until he’s rolled his way into a stop at the center of the end zone—ball still in hand—and finds his way upright that the he remembers this fact:

 

And then the crowd goes fucking ballistic.

 

The footage is on youtube. There’s gifs of it being sent around the school. There’s even a footnote in the scrawling fine print at the bottom of CBS Sport’s morning report.

 

Taiga spends the rest of the week in a daze; somewhere in cloud nine he manages to string together a coherent thought:

 

High school is _awesome._

 

*


End file.
